Chamber Music

Paul Knight

From the very first day that I met my partner Peter, I started taking photographs of us together. ‘Chamber Music’ (2009–) is a photographic series that depicts a couple in a very frank and intimate manner, capturing the patterns of the quotidian in their lives. Rest, sex, food, bathing and travelling are frequent motifs and as such a language of repetition manifests, leaning heavily on the vernacular history of the family snapshot.

This series is as much about the touch perceived between the two subjects and their world, as it is the potential for touch between the photograph and the viewer. The situation of sight becomes the rite of contact. This visual contact between viewer and viewed, I would say, is the basis for the political dimension of the work and to activate this the subjects make themselves vulnerable in the space of the photograph.

Images Paul Knight

‘Chamber Music’ aims to collapse the typical linear understandings and representations of time within photography and rebuild — via juxtaposition, association and memory — a space understood in terms of volume. A confused performative and confessional realm emerges, where appetites are offered so that photography can feed on some of the objects of its own obsessions.